Slowed? We're living through technological marvels that would have been unbelievable even twenty years ago except in science fiction - deep fakes, the metaverse, cellular robots, mRNA vaccines, vat grown meat, quantum computing, boston dynamics, mass adoption of electric cars, GPT-3, IoT, reusable rockets, real time photorealistic games, drones, consumer 3d printing, self driving cars, room temperature superconductors, GPU's, Amazon Dash human labour free supermarkets, organ printing, spine repair, commercial brain/computer interfaces etc.
Sure, a chip is still a chip and manufacturers have run up against physical limits of the medium, but the technological developments are increasing incrementally each year - these increases are almost taken for granted but they're huge!
IMHO the last substantial technological breakthrough was the miniaturisation of computers accompanied by an exponential growth in computing power that really got going in the 80s and is still ongoing today. That's about 40 years which makes it fairly recent compared to the other breakthroughs. It remains to be seen if it has a developmental wall as does older tech like aircraft and motorised vehicles.
Off the top of my head computers have had a significant impact on scientific research for their ability to store and correlate data; on machinery in general through their ability to fine-tune and automate performance, and on entertainment through their capacity for creating virtual worlds. CPUs in PCs no longer double in performance every 18 months since a limit has been reached as to how small one can make the transistors and how fast one can run the CPUs without them melting. But new applications are found for computer tech every day, so we haven't reached a wall yet in that department. That covers deep fakes, the metaverse, cellular robots, photorealistic games, self driving cars, GPUs, IoT, boston dynamics, Amazon Dash human labour free supermarkets and GPT-3. Time will tell whether this finally reaches a saturation point, in that machinery can't be fine-tuned or automated any further.
mRNA is new technology (actually it goes back to the 90s). The problem with it, as with all genetic engineering, is that we didn't invent the original biological machine which is so fantastically complex that we are decades away from fully understanding its workings - if we ever succeed in fully understanding them. It's a bit like developing a computer programme. Typically, a programmer spends twice as much time ironing out the bugs in a programme as he spends creating the programme in the first place. This is because the human brain can process only so much complexity at a time, making it impossible to foresee all the mutual cause and effect in very complex structures.
A living organism is far more complex than the most complex computer programme and the problem is made worse by the fact that - unlike with computer programmes - defects in genetic programming can sometimes take years to manifest themselves. The mRNA vaccine is a good example of this. Since its implementation all sorts of unexpected side-effects have appeared and we will need years to fully evaluate them. Genetic engineering is dangerous and IMHO substantial genetic engineering is reckless.
To briefly cover the rest:
Vat grown meat
I came across this article -
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. - which I found fascinating in that David Humbird, a UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer, mentions the "walls of no" - technological limits that no amount of ingenuity can cross:
"his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat. “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”"
Reusable rockets
Time will tell if reusability is a substantial breakthrough in launch costs or just an incremental improvement. At present, Space X charges $62 million for the launch of a new Falcon 9 and $50 million for a reused Falcon 9. We'll see if the latter price goes down. For now it represents a 12,5% saving which isn't such a big deal.
Drones
These represent the ability to make batteries light enough to allow for brief flights. Fun but I wouldn't call it a lifestyle-transforming breakthrough.
3D printing
Remember when 3D printing was going to revolutionise industry? That was until the penny dropped that it is impossible to mass-produce 3D objects since the printing process is so slow. Great for individual items but not for anything required in quantity.
Room Temperature Superconductors, organ printing, spine repair, commercial brain/computer interfaces
I don't know to what extent these can be made to work, will be of practical benefit and can be made cheap enough for widespread use.
